What’s so great about unnamed namespaces?

Back when I still used them, my code would usually evolve gradually through a few different “stages of visibility”. The first of these stages was the unnamed-namespace. Later stages would either be a free-function or a private/public member-function.

Lets say I identify a bit of code that I could reuse. I refactor it into a separate function. Since that bit of code is only used in that compile unit, it makes sense to put this function into an unnamed namespace that is only visible in the implementation of that unit.

Okay great, now we have reusability within this one compile unit, and we didn’t even have to recompile any of the units clients. Also, we can just “Hack away” on this code. It’s very local and exists solely to provide for our implementation needs. We can cobble it together without worrying that anyone else might ever have to use it.

This all feels pretty great at first. You are writing smaller functions and classes after all.

Whole class hierarchies are defined this way. Invisible to all but yourself. Protected and sheltered from the ugly world of external clients.

What’s so bad about unnamed namespaces?

However, there are two sides to this coin. Over time, one of two things usually happens:

1. The code is never needed again outside of the unit. Forgotten by all but the compiler, it exists happily in its seclusion.
2. The code is needed elsewhere.

Guess which one happens more often. The code is needed elsewhere. After all, that is usually the reason we refactored it into a function in the first place. Its reusability. When this is the case, one of these scenarios usually happes:

1. People forgot about it, and solve the problem again.
2. People never learned about it, and solve the problem again.
3. People know about it, and copy-and-paste the code to solve their problem.
4. People know about it and make the function more widely available to call it directly.

Except for the last, that’s a pretty grim outlook. The first two cases are usually the result of the bad discoverability. If you haven’t worked with that code extensively, it is pretty certain that you do not even know that is exists.

The third is often a consequence of the fact that this function was not initially written for reuse. This can mean that it cannot be called from the outside because it cannot be accessed. But often, there’s some small dependency to the exact place where it’s defined. People came to this function because they want to solve another problem, not to figure out how to make this function visible to them. Call it lazyness or pragmatism, but they now have a case for just copying it. It happens and shouldn’t be incentivised.

A Bug? In my code?

Now imagine you don’t care much about such noble long term code quality concerns as code duplication. After all, deduplication just increases coupling, right?

But you do care about satisfied customers, possibly because your job depends on it. One of your customers provides you with a crash dump and the stacktrace clearly points to your hidden and protected function. Since you’re a good developer, you decide to reproduce the crash in a unit test.

Only that does not work. The function is not accessible to your test. You first need to refactor the code to actually make it testable. That’s a terrible situation to be in.

What to do instead.

There’s really only two choices. Either make it a public function of your unit immediatly, or move it to another unit.

For functional units, its usually not a problem to just make them public. At least as long as the function does not access any global data.

For class units, there is a decision to make, but it is simple. Will using preserve all class invariants? If so, you can move it or make it a public function. But if not, you absolutely should move it to another unit. Often, this actually helps with deciding for what to create a new class!

Note that private and protected functions suffer many of the same drawbacks as functions in unnamed-namespaces. Sometimes, either of these options is a valid shortcut. But if you can, please, avoid them.

One thought on “Why I’m not using C++ unnamed namespaces anymore”

Shit: you once made me love the unnamed namespace as a handy “container” for my separated functions. And I don’t want to give up that love. But there is no denying that you gave a valid argument here to re-think my opinion. 😉